Social Media

Hakia's New Social Search: Discussion Boards on Steroids

Hakia is a semantic search engine that's just added a social feature called Meet Others. This is similar to Yahoo Answers in that it looks to tap into the larger user base to form discussions around search queries. These clusters of users and their similar queries are organized into rooms, where you can see what others have discussed already, or leave a question to be answered by your peers.

Coupled with the Meet Others voting system, now you have a way of ranking responses so that the most relevant become more prominent. Another tool that's been included in Meet Others is a click-to-chat option for those that have marked themselves as being available for chat. This level of social networking is very much like a glorified discussion board, without any registration prerequisites.

The good thing about Meet Others is that it lets you seek others as experts, and gives a human touch to the relevancy of your search. What's good about Meet Others being a part of Hakia's larger service is that you now have two options for searching: one being more social than the other.

There are a few social search tools that are developing out there, such as Attendi and Nsyght, which is working off a similar concept, building bits of social data in order to provide search resources. Then there's Twine, which is doing something similar, but with more of an automated process and less social in the sense of having a working discussion board.

What would be helpful for Hakia and most others would be the inclusion of social and non-social search being combined within these rooms. And this could be done in part by leveraging the social content found outside of Hakia. The good thing about search engines embarking on these social collection ventures is that they don't have to rely on content created specifically for their site, and within their established communities.

And from talking to Attendi, I know that the next steps for its social search tool is to enable better and automatic integration of social media and information for two-way conversations between third-party applications (such as chat tools) and its own search service. There are some video tours of Hakia's Meet Others tool that can be found here.

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